Thank you GamersGate for the review copy of this game!

Fortis is the average top-down space shooter that you would typically find littered all over the Apple app store. Outside of the app store, you will find hundreds of other games from this genre that are generally less than average. Truthfully, the only ones that left me impressed ended up being innovative, with excellent controls and a soundtrack worth humming to. Unfortunately, Fortis fails to impress in more ways than these three categories.

I'd like to point out that I was playing the PC version of this game and the views I express are based accordingly. With that being said, it's obvious that this version of the game is an extremely lazy port of the iOS version. When I booted up the game, I was presented with a nauseating title screen. The reason being, the quality of the images are so awful that I would literally feel sick while browsing the menu. Not to mention, the game doesn't scale up to your screen resolution so you will see enormous, pixelated letters.

The gameplay is very similar to the old arcade classic “Asteroids”, in which enemies will come from different corners of the screen. The object of the game is to destroy a certain percentage of the enemy ships that show up before the time limit. You have a health and a shields bar, and depending on how much damage you take, it will deplete them. There are 4 different weapons that you may use to counterattack the enemies, which are: the cannon (unlimited ammunition, weakest weapon), the plasma (cheap ammunition, bad accuracy, slightly stronger than cannon), the obligatory rocket (expensive ammunition, single shot, powerful) and the fireball (slightly expensive ammunition, automatic, powerful). While you play, enemies that have been destroyed will drop ammunition and money which can be used to purchase upgrades for your weapons and extra ammunition. You have 3 lives and when you lose all of them, the game ends and your save file gets deleted.

As you can see, the concept of the game isn't really that bad, however, it's the controls that ultimately ruin the experience. I feel like the actual design of the controls aren't very suitable for a keyboard. To clarify, you use the "up" key to accelerate, the "left" and "right" keys to turn the ship and the "down" key to brake. The movement is very similar to that of a car; if you accelerate and hold down the left key, you will fly around in a complete circle until you let go. Another thing I'd like to mention is that to turn around you need to double tap the back button twice and then accelerate. This causes severe frustration when you're in the heat of battle because, more likely than not, you will end up slamming into enemies instead of avoiding them. There is also another way to control the ship by using your mouse but it's the exact same control scheme used on a touch screen and ends up becoming even more frustrating and unresponsive. So, this goes all the way back to my claim of this game being a terrible port of the iOS version.

There are 2 whole songs that you will hear while playing Fortis and they really aren't that great. In fact, I felt like they made the experience of playing this game worse than it already was. After hearing the same songs repeatedly for an hour straight, I muted the music and started listening to my own playlist of music. The good news is, the sound effects are actually not too bad and there isn't really anything to complain about when it comes down to that aspect.

Like I mentioned earlier, the game does not scale up to your screen resolution. Even though, before you boot the game, you are able to select the proper screen resolution, I didn't notice any difference in the quality whatsoever. Besides that, the graphics are nothing spectacular. I can admit that it might look great on iOS devices, but on the PC version the game looks outdated. 

When it comes to the Morality aspect of this review, the only thing I saw were spaceships getting destroyed. You won't see any blood, bad language or sexual content.

Overall, Fortis wasn't an enjoyable experience for me whatsoever. Combine horrible controls with annoying music and outdated graphics and you will get Fortis. I'm even more upset since I found out that this game is worth around 10 dollars on GamersGate when it's possible to get the exact same game on an iPod Touch for around a dollar. With this in mind, Fortis is a complete disappointment and I suggest that you stay away from both versions of this game and find a better substitute if you're craving to play a game from this particular genre.